[PEN-L:852] Re: Re: New Information World Order Project

[Bill Rosenberg <w.rosenberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bill Lear wrote:

> How about a primer on what exactly constitutes computer programming?
> I was laying awake for a few hours last night after a day of coffee
> overdose and was thinking about writing up just what it is that us
> geeks behind the scenes of Linux, etc., are doing...

An interesting paper is "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric S.
Raymond (http://www.ssc.com/linux/Eric/cathedral.html). It is a
mixture of the technical and the philosophical but its main theme is
that complex software can be developed successfully through a
"bazaar" model (like Linux). A lead developer releases test versions
frequently onto the Internet and the community of users debugs it and
comes up with new ideas as well as fixes. The result is communally
written software. Interestingly, Netscape have adopted the model, at
least in part.

The contrast is with the classical commercial "cathedral" model where
the emphasis is on control of the process. There are questions as
to how scalable that is.

Raymond's paper is well written and thought-provoking but doesn't
cover many questions such as the integrity of the software (including
trojan horses and the like) and its expected life time. His
discussion of "selfish agents" (those participating in the
development process without reward) is shallow, seemingly trying to
shoehorn them into a market model.

Bill


Bill Rosenberg, w.rosenberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx